Some, or all, data of a client that is stored on a primary storage may be backed up to a secondary or backup storage. A client can be a standalone personal computing device, a server, or a virtual machine. Client data can include one or more files, an entire file system, an image backup of the client, or a system dump by inode of the file system. Before data is backed up, it may be compressed or deduplicated by a backup system. Thus, when the backed up data object is requested for restoration to the client, the data object may need to be decompressed or undeduplicated before it is usable by a client file system. In a virtual environment, networked environment, or multi-user computing environment, data on the primary storage may have security attributes that determine which user(s), group(s), or client(s) are authorized to access the data on the primary storage. In the prior art, a backup is typically performed under a system administrator's authority which has greater access privileges than most users, groups, or clients. Accordingly, the backed up data is not accessible by individual users, groups, or clients and often requires that the administrator perform the restore in response to a user request. Also in the prior art, data is written to a backup data set in a linear fashion such that, in order to access a particular data object in the backup data set, it is necessary to either record absolute offset of all data objects in the backup data set in advance, which would cause poor deduplication for additional backups, or sequentially walk data objects in the backup data set until a particular data object to be accessed for restoration is found, which is highly inefficient. For at least the foregoing reasons, in the prior art users cannot efficiently access, without losing deduplication, or view, or restore their own data objects from a backup of their own data.